Confessed right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik has told police that he was “addicted to computer games,” spending thousands of hours online before he bombed Norway’s government headquarters and gunned down Labour Party summer campers. Newspaper Aftenposten reported that coppers have found logs indicating that Breivik spent even more time on computer games than he’d admitted.

He told coppers that he spent around 8,700 hours playing the games between 2006 and 2010. Police found that between November 2010 and April 2011, Breivik spent 500 hours playing “World of Warcraft” alone.

The mass murderers games of choice included “Modern Warfare,” “Elder scrolls,” “Dragon Age” and “Warhammer.” He told police that playing games was “camouflage” for planning his terrorist attacks, and that to “reward” himself, he decided to devote most of an entire year to them. Cops think he played WoW up to 12 hours a day over a two-year period.

The Swedes are frantically looking around to see what could have turned Breivik into a psycho and are looking at the games. Breivik has used terminology from WoW in his “manifesto.”

An Italian bloke who was so addicted to playing online computer games has been jailed after beating up his life for telling him to stop.

According to Italian press reports, the bloke who has been identified as “Nino C,” hails from Canegrate and spent 20 hours a day playing an online roleplaying game. It got so bad that he started to lose jobs and then, when his wife tried to keep him away from the PC, he started beating her up.

The man was stopped by agents of the Commissioner of Legnano following the complaint lodged by his wife, who finally decided to put an end to the abuse that lasted over a year. Although the fact that he also appeared to be having an online affair with another player did not help.

The family took off only holiday to Sicily for him to detoxify, but that just made him worse. He suffered from illnesses including seizures, until he was forced into a psychiatric hospital in Legnano. However soon after he was released he beat up his wife so badly she ended up in hospital and the cops were called.

The harrowing case is being touted in the Italian press as an example of the dangers of online gaming.

We're all aware of a ridiculously long-lasting streak of blaming lousy parenting on schools, TV and whatever else capable of lifting responsibility from selfish shoulders, so I guess we're now ready for fears that toddlers might become iPhone addicts.

A professor at Temple University, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek was recently struck by how many parents give their phones to their children to play with on the subway. She says how this can’t be good as children learn best through active engagement, making the screen an actual hindrance in this respect.

Kathy specializes in early language development and strangely enough, while she’s all against this, she says that she understands where this comes from. Apparently, she is “addicted to this phone” and calls it “magical”. We’re not sure how was that supposed to help the case, but we guess it sure makes for a good ad.

One mother, Natasha Sykes, recalls her daughter being 2 years old and simply loving the iPhone. She and her husband initially found it cute that the child really digs Jobs’ brainchild, but there was also some concern. Apparently, the child preferred the shiny iPhone over regular toys, books, etc.

We decided to dig deeper and interestingly enough, crows also have a tendency to go for shinier objects. Crows, however, seem to have developed a disdain towards the latest iPhone because it is overpriced and its “aluminosilicate glass” case appears to be really hard to bring to the nest without breaking.